In a review of 324 long stay psychiatric patients, 37 per cent of them were found to suffer also from physical disorders. A little over half of them (18% of the total) suffered from “psychosomatic” disorder. While in the total populations 38.5 per cent of the patients were free from institutionalism, in the “psychosomatic” patients the percentage was only 25.8 per cent (p < 0.05). It is possible that “psychosomatic” diseases are a biological inferiority predisposing to institutionalism.
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